Forget, forgive, renounce, abdicate

When Henry Miller moved to Big Sur on the northern California coast in 1944, it was barely populated. He lived with his wife and children in a shack overlooking the pacific ocean. Having very little income (many of his books were still banned in the U.S.), he was often saved from total financial collapse by the generosity of his friends and fans. A simple life, and the simple things in life, kept him happier and more at peace than the bulk of humanity chained to chasing money.

To offer simply what Big Sur has taught me would be no small thing. I say Big Sur, not America. For, however much a part of America Big Sur may be, and it is American through and through, what distinguishes it is something more than the word America conveys. If I were to single out one element in the American temperament which has been exalted here, it would be kindness. It has always been the custom here on the Coast, when raising one’s glass, to say: “Here’s kindness!” I have never heard the expression used elsewhere.

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The great hoax which we are perpetuating every day of our lives is that that we are making life easier, more comfortable, more enjoyable, more profitable. We are doing just the contrary. We are making life stale, flat and unprofitable every day in every way. One ugly word covers it all: waste. Our thoughts, our energies, our very lives are being used up to create what is unwise, unnecessary, unhealthy. The stupendous activity which goes on in forest, field, mine and factory never adds up to happiness, contentment, peace of mind, or long life for those engaged in it.

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In simplifying our lives, everything acquires a significance hitherto unknown. When we are one with ourselves the most insignificant blade of grass assumes its proper place in the universe. Or a piece of manure, for that matter.

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The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are.

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You can spend the rest of your life fighting it out on every front, in every vector—and get nowhere. Give up, throw in the sponge, and possibly you will look at the world with new eyes. More than possibly you will see your friends and enemies in a new light…

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… what the average citizen can not or will not do, is to enjoy solitude, to live simply, to crave nothing, and to share what he has when called upon.

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That the American way of life is an illusory kind of existence, that the price demanded for the security and abundance it pretends to offer is too great.

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Our tourists returning from abroad dwell on the poverty and misery of the great masses in Europe, Asia, Africa. They speak with pride of the abundance which we in America share. They talk of efficiency, sanitation, home comforts, high wages, the freedom to move about and to speak one’s mind, and so on. They speak of these privileges as if they were American “inventions.” (As if there had never been a Greece, a Rome, an Egypt, a China, an India, a Persia.) They never speak of the price we pay for these comforts, for all this progress and abundance. (As if we were free of crime, disease, suicide, infanticide, prostitution, alcoholism, addiction to drugs, military training, armament races and the obsession with lethal weapons.)

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If ever we are to witness a new heaven and a new earth, it must surely be one in which money is absent, forgotten, wholly useless.

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As for Jesus, by all accounts he didn’t own a toothbrush. No baggage, no furniture, no change of linen, no handkerchief, no passport, no identity card, no bankbook, no love letters, no insurance policy, no address book. To be sure, he had no wife, no children, no home (not even a winter palace) and no correspondence to look after. As far as we know, he never wrote a line. Home was where-ever he happened to be. Not where he hung his hat—because he never wore a hat. He had no wants, that’s the thing. He didn’t even have to think about such a menial job as wardrobe attendant. After a time he ceased working as a carpenter. Not that he was looking for bigger wages. No, he had more important work to do. He set out to prove the absurdity of living by the sweat of one’s brow. Behold the lilies in the field….

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Even if it last for only a few moments, the privilege of looking at the world as a spectacle of unending life and not as a repository of persons, creatures and objects to be impressed into our service, is something never to be forgotten.

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We all want to extract the full measure of life. Must we go to books and teachers, to science, religion, philosophy, must we know so much—and so little!—to take the path? Can we not become fully awake and aware without the torture we put ourselves through?”

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The longing for paradise, whether here on earth or in the beyond, has almost ceased to be. Instead of an idée-force it has become an idée fixe. From a potent myth it has degenerated into a taboo. Men will sacrifice their lives to bring about a better world—whatever that may mean—but they will not budge an inch to attain paradise. Nor will they struggle to create a bit of paradise in the hell they find themselves. It is so much easier, and gorier, to make revolution, which means, to put it simply, establishing another, a different, status quo.

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When should one lend oneself to action? What constitutes an act? And may it not be that not to act is sometimes a higher form of action? Jesus was silent before Pontius Pilate. The Buddha delivered his greatest sermon by holding a flower up to the multitude to behold.

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Naturally, the more attention one gives to the deplorable conditions outside the less one is able to enjoy what peace and liberty he possesses. Even if it be heaven we find ourselves in, we can render it suspect and dubious.

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There is no mystery about disease, nor crime, nor war, nor the thousand and one things which plague us. Live simply and wisely. Forget, forgive, renounce, abdicate.

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It may indeed be the highest wisdom to elect to be a nobody in a relative paradise such as this rather than a celebrity in a world which has lost all sense of values.

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… acquiring knowledge is like biting into a cheese which grows bigger with every bite.

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We are in the habit of speaking of “the last frontier,” but wherever there are “individuals” there will always be new frontiers. For the man who wants to lead the good life, which is a way of saying his own life, there is always a spot where he can dig in and take root.

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a simple regimen to follow: Don’t overeat, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke too much, don’t work too much, don’t think too much, don’t fret, don’t worry, don’t complain, above all, don’t get irritable. Don’t use a car if you can walk to your destination; don’t walk if you can run; don’t listen to the radio or watch television; don’t read newspapers, magazines, digests, stock market reports, comics, mysteries or detective stories; don’t take sleeping pills or wakeup pills; don’t vote, don’t buy on the instalment plan, don’t play cards either for recreation or to make a haul, don’t invest your money, don’t mortgage your home, don’t get vaccinated or inoculated, don’t violate the fish and game laws, don’t irritate your boss, don’t say yes when you mean no, don’t use bad language, don’t be brutal to your wife or children, don’t get frightened if you are over or under weight, don’t sleep more than ten hours at a stretch, don’t eat store bread if you can bake your own, don’t work at a job you loathe, don’t think the world is coming to an end because the wrong man got elected, don’t believe you are insane because you find yourself in a nut house, don’t do anything more than you’re asked to do but do that well, don’t try to help your neighbor until you’ve learned how to help yourself, and so on…

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In short, don’t create aerial dinosaurs with which to frighten field mice!

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Those who do more than is asked of them are never depleted. Only those who fear to give are weakened by giving. The art of giving is entirely a spiritual affair. In this sense, to give one’s all is meaningless, for there is no bottom where true giving is concerned.

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And our millionaires—are they happy? They, at least, should be gay, jovial, light of heart. Is not the goal of all our striving to have even more than one wants? Look at them, our poor millionaires! The sorriest specimens of humanity on earth. How I wish the starving Asiatics could become millionaires overnight, all of them! How quickly they would realize the futility of the American way!

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And the workers—the highest paid in all the world, as we proudly boast. Own their own cars, their own homes. (Some of them.) But all loaded with insurance, war bonds, cemetery plots. Children educated free of charge, schools equipped with playgrounds and recreation centers, food approved by the Pure Food inspectors. Factories air-conditioned. Toilets sanitary and always in good working order. Forty hours a week, double pay for overtime. At a hundred a week they find it difficult to make ends meet. The government robs them, the banks rob them, the merchants rob them, the labor leaders rob them, the boss robs them, everybody robs them. They rob one another.

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When do we begin to know that we know? When we have ceased to believe that we can ever know. Truth comes with surrender. And it’s wordless. The brain is not the mind; it is a tyrant which seeks to dominate the mind.

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To be alone, if only for a few minutes, and to realize it with all one’s being, is a blessing we seldom think to implore. The man of the big city dreams of life in the country as a refuge from all that plagues him and renders life intolerable. What he fails to realize, however, is that he can be more alone, if he chooses, in the midst of ten million souls than in a tiny community. To experience the feeling of aloneness is a spiritual achievement. The man who runs away from the city in search of this experience may find to his chagrin, particularly if he has brought with him all the cravings which city life fosters, that he has succeeded only in becoming lonely. “Solitude is for wild beasts or the gods,” said someone. And there is truth in it.

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In brief, we have behaved as a people would who have had more than their share of the good things of life, who have not been crippled morally, physically and spiritually by successive invasions and revolutions. Yet we have failed completely to ameliorate the harrowing conditions which beset the rest of the world. Not only that, but we ourselves have deteriorated and retrogressed. We have lost much of the character, the independence, the buoyancy and resiliency, to say nothing of the courage, faith and optimism, of our forefathers. Still a young nation, we are already weary, filled with doubts and misgivings, and absolutely at sea as to what course to pursue in world affairs. All we seem able to do is to give ourselves more injections and arm to the teeth. When we do not truculently threaten or menace, we wheedle, cajole and appease as best we know how.

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If it is abundance we worship, then common sense would dictate that we cease wasting our time and energy on the manufacture of destructive products and destructive thoughts. Imagine a man who is strong and healthy, who wants nothing of his neighbor because he has more than enough at home, and who insists on taking pills, donning a full coat of armor when he goes to work, and then proceeds to build walls around his dwelling place so that nobody will break in and rob him of so much as a crust of bread.

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“What do you believe in?” I asked. “The Creator!” he replied. “Have you a religion?” “No. I belong to the Bahai movement. That’s the only religion.” “So!” I made a clucking noise and preened my feathers.

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The whole Alexandrian world was as familiar and vivid to him as if he had known it in a previous incarnation. The Manichean world of thought was also a reality to him. Of Zoroastrian teachings he dwelt by predilection on that aspect which proclaims “the reality of evil.” Possibly he also believed that Ormuzd would eventually prevail over Ahriman, but if so it was an eventuality only realizable in a distant future, a future so distant as to render all speculation about it, or even hope in it, futile.

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This is the lone-American type I admire, the kind I believe in, can get along with, and whom I vote for even though he’s never nominated for office. The democratic man our poets sang of but who, alas, is being rapidly exterminated, along with the buffalo, the moose and the elk, the great bear, the eagle, the condor, the mountain lion. The sort of American that never starts a war, never raises a feud, never draws the color line, never tries to lord it over his fellow-man, never yearns for a higher education, never holds a grudge against his neighbor, never treats an artist shabbily and never turns a beggar away. Often untutored and unlettered, he sometimes has more of the poet and the musician in him, philosopher too, than those who are acclaimed as such. His whole way of life is aesthetic. What marks him as different, sometimes ridiculous, is his sincerity and originality. That he aspires to be none other than himself, is this not the essence of wisdom?

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Well, nobody belongs who’s trying to simplify his life. Nobody belongs who isn’t trying to make money, or trying to make money make money. Nobody belongs who wears the same suit of clothes year in and year out, who doesn’t shave, who doesn’t believe in sending his children to school to be miseducated, who doesn’t join up with Church, Grange and Party, who doesn’t serve “Murder, Death and Blight, Inc.” Nobody belongs who doesn’t read Time, Life, and one of the Digests. Nobody belongs who doesn’t vote, carry insurance, live on the instalment plan, pile up debts, keep a check account and deal with the Safeway stores or the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. Nobody belongs who doesn’t read the current best sellers and help support the paid pimps who dump them on the market. Nobody belongs who is fool enough to believe that he is entitled to write, paint, sculpt or compose music according to the dictates of his own heart and conscience. Or who wants to be nothing more than an artist, an artist from tip to toe.

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Peace and solitude! I have had a taste of it, even here in America. Ah, those first days on Partington Ridge! On rising I would go to the cabin door and, casting my eyes over the velvety, rolling hills, such a feeling of contentment, such a feeling of gratitude was mine that instinctively my hand went up in benediction. Blessings! Blessings on you, one and all! I blessed the trees, the birds, the dogs, the cats, I blessed the flowers, the pomegranates, the thorny cactus, I blessed men and women everywhere, no matter on which side of the fence they happened to be. That is how I like to begin each day. A day well begun, I say. And that is why I choose to remain here, on the slopes of the Santa Lucia, where to give thanks to the Creator comes natural and easy. Out yonder they may curse, revile and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world, with noble, ancient trees, scrub and sagebrush, wild lilac and lovely lupin, with poppies and buzzards, eagles and humming birds, gophers and rattlesnakes, and sea and sky unending. Finis.

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